1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to communications systems and more particularly to a radio frequency bus for broadband microprocessor communications.
2. Related Art
The limitations associated with high speed communications at the microprocessor bus level represent one of the biggest challenges the computer industry faces as it enters the twenty first century. Performance improvements in computer bus, board and system designs have been, and will continue to be, far outpaced by the microprocessor itself. Thus, while the microprocessor is processing data at higher and higher rates of speed, the flow of information to nearby devices (such as memory, hard drives, etc.) is being limited by the speed with which the system bus operates.
Performance improvements in microprocessor design include advances in silicon technology, enhanced levels of integration and the introduction of parallel execution. In contrast, board design advances have been limited due to the relatively fixed physical dimensions of the board, box, pluggable sockets and bus. In addition, advances in board design have been severely hampered by the requirement of "pluggable options," such as memory devices, modems, graphics cards, etc. that must plug into relatively standardized slots. Moreover, because board designers do not know what devices the bus will eventually service, the bus represents a transmission line system that can not be properly terminated or even easily characterized.
Past attempts to increase bus performance by operating at higher frequencies have resulted in degraded communications plagued with multiple reflections and resonances that corrupt the data being transferred. Such problems have only been solved by restricting the pluggable options in order to make the transmission lines better behaved.
Furthermore, while it is possible to increase bandwidth within the microprocessor by making the communication bus wider (e.g., by adding a few thousand more wires), the solution is impractical outside of the processor where system boards and pluggable slots are of a finite dimension. Thus, a need exists for an improved transmission line system to handle advances in microprocessor performance.